Post-Evangelical Easter Reflection

These are some of my reflections, as a post-Evangelical-possibly-heretical-possibly-not-Christian, about Easter. I wrote this in my journal in the sunshine today and, wanting it to have a home, I (pardon the pun) resurrected this blog. 

Reading time: 8 minutes

My Evangelically-Shaped Easter

I used to view Easter as a day (/weekend / week) to observe the historical moment in time where my inevitable, innumerable sins were paid for by a perfect God-man.  This gift, of God paying the price of my sins, was graciously offered to me and to everyone else in the entire world, past and present. (Or was it just present and future? I forget). Given that I’d already accepted God's gift of Eternal life--I did this as a young child, like most of the children in my church community--I knew I was saved from eternal damnation (aka hell. The eternal burn.)  

Because this was my worldview, Easter was, for the earliest years of my life,  both a joyous occasion to rejoice in my promised salvation but also a pressing reminder that many of my (unchurched) friends were still on the path to end up in hell when they died. (Because, you know…they hadn’t accepted the gift that Jesus offered them.)

I did what any loving evangelical convinced by this truth would do: I prayed fervently for God to work in their hearts so that they, too, might come to know the joy of eternal life in Christ. I prayed that they might one day be able to join me and the rest of the church congregation when we proclaimed “He is risen indeed!"

(NB: Some of you, reading my claim of wanting other friends to “know the joy” along my parallel statements about burning in hellfire might think I’m being facetious. But I promise: I am not. I really did feel such a deep joy on account of my Christian faith, and I longed for others I loved to feel it too. I have a lot of compassion for the version of myself who saw the world in this way; I know I felt a lot of love for others—in the way that I knew how to. So if you’re feeling like rolling your eyes or shaking your fists at any Christians you know who currently conceptualize life in these ways, I invite you to try to first remember that they are seeing the world in a different way than you are; and probably their hearts are filled to the brim with love for you—in the way that they know how. Anyway, I digress.)

 

So that was Easter for me. For about 20 years or so. A mix of joy and fear. Both feelings were immense. 

(Now, it’s worth noting that not all Christians interpret Easter in the way that I did. Easter was not (/is not) a reminder about salvation vs. damnation for the many Christians who do not believe in a literal hell from which our sinful selves need to be saved via a payment of a perfect being. I don’t know quite enough about other Christian modes of interpreting Easter to summarize them here, but I know they are plentiful and I don’t want to paint them all with the same brush. There are huge variations within the religion we call Christianity.

But this sin-ridden, hell-bound humans + loving, debt-paying Saviour was the Christianity that I grew up in and, thus, this was Easter for me. It was a striking reminder about eternity, and a time to rejoice that you’ve been saved while also fret for those who aren’t.)

Given that this particular mode of interpreting Easter was so dominant in my psyche for so many years, I am not altogether surprised that I eventually veered away from that view. I do, however, personally find it VERY strange and unexpected that, this year, I find myself acutely (re)drawn to celebrate Easter. But here I am. 

Post-Evangelical Explorations of Religion/Spirituality 

For those of you who do not know, I have spent the last decade or so exploring religious and spiritual views that extend far beyond the lens that the church I grew up in taught me to see the world through. In these last ~10 years, I have identified as an atheist, an agnostic, an ignostic, a Jew, a Buddhist, a Christian, a bhakt, “Spiritual But Not Religious”, “Religious But Not Spiritual”, and “Other” ….depending on who was asking me the question and how much time I had for my answer. 

A lot of my discomfort with identifying (solely) as a Christian now is due to the fact that the type of Christianity that I once (strongly and happily!) identified with is now very far from being a comfortable fit for me.  If I were to try to wear my earlier Christianity like a sweater, it would feel itchy, scratchy. It barely fits over my head. And yet... 

I love so many of the teachings of Christ. Indeed, I cannot help but think that if he looked me in the eyes and said “follow me” then I would pack my bag (—wait, I forget: am I allowed to take the time to pack a bag? It’s been awhile since I’ve read that biblical passage in Matthew…) and run after him. I would want to follow him, and be in his presence.  Sit at his feet; absorb his teachings. (At least for a little bit? Wouldn’t you? Who would not want to be in the presence of such a teacher!?!?!) So, given that I long to follow Christ... am I a Christian? Who gets to decide if I “count” as one? Does the fact that the Christianity I was born-and-raised with is no longer the Christianity I wish to embrace mean that I must forfeit the identity once and for all? 

I honestly do not know. *shrugs*

(One of the reasons I often, self-protectively, remind people that I am not a theologian (I am, rather, a cultural anthropologist who studies religion) is that a theologian would probably be required to have an answer for that question of whether or not I "count" as a Christian. I quite like that I am allowed to shrug my anthropological shoulders at it. A theologian would know a lot more about the history of Christian doctrinal norms over the years, and they would be able to say “yes or no” to my questions about whether believing X, Y, or Z about Jesus is enough to let me pass as a Christian.  

I'm *not* a theologian, but I vaguely remember reading something by the Christian theologian Roger Haight in the delightful book Jesus and Buddha: Friends in Conversation where he asserted that there are a few “bottom line” doctrinal points that Christians have to believe in in order to be a Christian. One of these doctrines was about belief in resurrection. If that's correct, then even if I’m able to INTERPRET resurrection as having a different purpose than paying my sin-debt, I suppose I do struggle to believe that someone was medically dead for three days and then returned to life. So maybe I’m eternally-outcast on the Christian identity bit, I’m not sure. Go ask a theologian!)

Returning to Easter

But here’s the thought that has kept circling around in my mind leading up to, and during, this Easter weekend: I care about Easter. After a multi-year hiatus from caring at all about it--or really any religious holy day--it is beginning to feel meaningful for me once again. So, I've wondered: why am I leaning back towards it? What’s the substance of my inklings? (Some Christians might say that God is calling me back to him. I suppose that's a possibility.) But, at this point in time, I'm more interested in what is going on in my heart/mind/soul/body. What rises up in me? If Easter is giving me an emotional response, what are these emotions? (FYI, I'm trying to get better at knowing and naming my emotions. It's something that Marc Brackett speaks very wisely about.) There is no tangible sense of joy, nor fear, that I have been able to locate and yet there is a deep sense of meaning, respect, and awe. 

I’ve been trying to narrow in on what I find meaningful about Easter. Is it akin to nostalgia? Or, levelling-up, is it like the Portuguese saudade , e.g. the deep emotionally-entrenched longing for the familiar? Or is it that I want to be able to punctuate my annual calendar with spiritually-meaningful moments, and the global take-over of Christianity has made it quite convenient to align myself with Christian holidays? After all, I’m not sure about you, but my Good Friday day-off-work was, indeed, quite good!

It might be some of those things. 

But I think it is also the story of Easter itself that I find meaningful and compelling: it’s a story about a loving, wise teacher who inspired many and challenged more. Who chose non-violence when faced with violence. Who suffered, brutally, in
the midst of it all—who felt abandonment/betrayal from God himself [...herself.../Itself..?]—and who still persevered. And who, the story goes, managed to overturn the very notion of death itself through resurrection. It's a story about the act of death itself being somehow able to defeat death...in other words, it's a story about how all things eventually turn back to life. 

Photo by Nika Kuchuk

Resurrection is Everywhere

This sense---that all things eventually turn back to life---feels overwhelmingly true the more I experience and reflect on life. As the snow melts around me and the energies of springtime begin to flow—in the budding leaves, in the soaring and singing birds, in the rippling water…and, I hasten to admit, in the smelly dog-shit and bits of trash that are being more and more revealed in my neighbour’s backyard—I cannot help but feel that a story about the way that everything leads back again to life, is a story worth celebrating. Resurrection tales are not unique to Christianity and Jesus, but the details of the Jesus/Christian story are a uniquely-formed invitation to reflect on the ways that death and life intertwine and, indeed, get mixed up with each other. I for one find the story quite awe-inspiring. 

I’m a little fuzzy over whether it’s rude or even inappropriate for me to summarize the Easter story in this way without paying attention to either historicity or theological accuracy. But I love the story. It feels hopeful—if a little heretical. 

A Cultural and Spiritual Transformation

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I am still grappling with a succinct "reasons why humans hate/discriminate against/kill each other," but it is in this same vein that I am motivated to study religion/theology and its dynamic intersection with culture. We indeed need a cultural and spiritual transformation.

And, if you even glimpse at the news sporadically, you are more than aware of how much room for change there is in our many religious, political, educational, and cultural spheres. There is so much more room to love more widely and more deeply. I think all hands are needed in this--no matter your career/hobbies/skills/passions etc.--because each of us have our own ever-widening circles of influence where we can be more loving and encourage others to do the same.

And to those of us who are able to devote ourselves 'full time' to questions of religion and culture (I would place many students and scholars of religion more broadly in this category, as well as those in leadership positions of spiritual communities), well...... I hope we can find creative ways to use our insights and knowledge to evoke positive change.

p.s. please feel free to kick me in the pants whenever I (again) begin to fret more about trying to walk delicately on egg shells in some imagined-path to a tenure track job than I do about following my passion.

Unafraid of Contradictions

This quotation reminds me to not accept or construct false binaries; not everything in this world is either black or white. It also reminds me not to not jump to conclusions--especially when it's about the character of another person--and not to hate that which I've barely taken the time to know. It reminds me that these beliefs which say 'I am right and you are wrong,' or the beliefs which discourage real dialogue (even when under the guise of conversation) are painful not only in the sense that they destroy positive relationships that might have otherwise flourished, but they also imprison us. We become chained to our dogmas, to our safe interpretations of our world. It is sometimes the same walls which surround us and makes us feel protected that close out the world around us. What a pity.

"I am not an idealist, nor a cynic, but merely unafraid of contradictions. I have seen men face each other when both were right, yet each was determined to kill the other, which was wrong. What each man saw was an image of the other, made by someone else. That is what we are prisoners of."
- Donald Hogan (1972)


I wonder what we all see when we look at the people in our lives. When we see them in a positive/negative light..what is it that has encouraged/allowed us to paint them in that way?


Below are some thoughts/questions I have, which I originally wrote out for a different purpose, but they seem applicable to this conversation.


1) What convictions do you hold? Especially, which convictions do you hold to when it comes to the nature of God, reality, truth, love, etc.? Because we all hold to something. Throughout different periods of my life I have considered myself to be a Christian, an atheist, and a bewildered agnostic (to name a few!), and in each of these identities I held strong convictions. What are the convictions that you hold to?

2) How do these convictions affect those whom you love? (Or, since many religious scriptures call us to be loving to strangers and even enemies, let us go one step farther: how do your convictions affect others in your community more broadly speaking?) Is there any degree or form of hurt that results?
And, importantly, is their hurt worth more or less than you maintaining your conviction? This can sometimes be an extremely difficult question; and, like all difficult questions, I do not think there is always an easy answer.


3) In what light do your convictions paint those who think or act differently than you? Try to think of some specific people—perhaps you could choose a spectrum of “different worldviews.” How do you view these people? Are they ‘lost,’ ‘blind,’ ‘deluded,’ ‘deceived,’ ‘ignorant,’ ‘hell-bound,’ ‘naïve,’ ‘plain stupid?’ How does your worldview paint you? Are you among the spiritually elect, the elite, or the enlightened? Has God ‘chosen you?’ and what might this say in terms of the love of God.


4) What would others think of your idea of them? (And how do you think they perceive you?)

Living in Academia's Ivory Tower and 'Filling the Gap'

A major preoccupation of academics is finding and filling a “gap in the literature.” These “gaps” can be quite elusive and difficult to find but, so we’re told, finding them and filling them is an important contribution to our field/s of study, and to academia in general. Especially as graduate students, we are told to make sure we write about something that hasn’t been written about before, or do something that hasn’t been done before, if we want to make a splash and have ourselves and our work be noticed by the Big Fish in academia.  

And yet—in the same breath—we are cautioned to not do something too wild or too unfamiliar. Afterall, ‘who do we think we are?’ We have to make sure we simultaneously secure our work comfortably in the protective arms of a successful academic’s theories and ideas while saying something new. 

I imagine this balancing act to be something like this:

But, a pretty important question that should be asked is why it matters to follow this model of scholarship. What is worthwhile about it? Of course, we can’t sustain a model of academia in which no one contributes (in the broadest possible sense of the word) anything new to the existing bodies of work, but why is it that so much emphasis has been placed on finding and filling a content gap?

In some fields this makes sense: i.e. in Medicine: “Thus far, people have found cures/ effective treatments for laryngitis, smallpox, and polio, but no one has yet found a cure/effective treatment for tuberculosis; my research seeks to find that.” You can imagine Robert Koch, the German physician and scientist who in 1882 discovered the bacteria that causes tuberculosis, proposing something like this in a thesis proposal or grant application. Alright, it seems legitimate. Good job and finding and filling a content gap, Dr. Koch!

Dr. Robert Koch keeping it cool; yanked from Wikipedia Images

But this same model of academia is slightly less straightforward in other disciplines. I feel I have a right to pick on anthropology of religion because that is my own field. I wrote my master’s thesis on Protestant Charismatic Christian practices of spiritual healing in a Canadian (Ottawa, to be specific) context. It was a small-scale ethnographic study that drew from a tiny sample. In justifying its validity as a research topic, I argued something like this: “there are studies of spiritual healing in non-Western countries, and in non-Christian religions, okay and there’s also one of a Catholic Charismatic Christian community in the USA…but no one has written about the phenomenon in a Canadian, Protestant context! I’ll write about that!”

Gap = found and filled.

…But to what end? And for what point? 

Don’t get me wrong. I think there’s value in studying a variety of topics, even the ones that don’t contribute to the cure of tuberculosis. As a cultural anthropologist, I believe that learning more about the diversity of human thought and behaviour (both past and present) is extremely valuable. And as an (aspiring) advocate and activist, I think it’s important to bring underrepresented and marginalised experiences/stories/voices into broader conversations—to know that not everyone thinks/believes the same things we do, and that even within a religious community like “Canadian Protestants” there’s a lot of diversity of beliefs. Being reminded of these beliefs and learning more about the details of them can, I think, help us to reduce prejudice and hatred for people who believe/think/act differently than we do.  This hope is a significant motivating factor behind my scholarly pursuits.

But, realistically, did my writing an academic dissertation about this accomplish the very thing that motivated me to write it? Let’s see.
□ Learn about the diversity of human thought and behaviour?
Check.
□ Bring underrepresented and marginalised experiences into broader [scholarly] conversations?
Check.
□ Help reduce people’s prejudice and hatred for people who believe/think/act differently.
....I’m personally not so sure about that last one, and here’s why:

Let’s consider my master’s thesis, which I successfully defended in June 2015.

 

Even though I wrote its opening pages in a narrative voice that read like fiction, and even though I tried to keep academic jargon to a minimum throughout it, at ~60,000 words and tonnes of footnotes and references, it isn’t exactly a cake-walk. And, because of the expectations of academic theses, I had to include a full-scale literature review and methods/theory section, both of which can be quite boring to read through for a specialist in your field, let alone someone outside of that.

Although it’s by no means a hard and fast rule, there is a tendency within specialised academic writing to spiral deeper and deeper into a hole of intimidating jargon and confusing ideas, wherein what once started off as interesting and intelligent transforms into a boring beast.

Or, as one of my professors at the University of Ottawa used to say: “you know that story where that guy can turn whatever he wants into gold? So theoretically you could take a big shit and then turn it into gold? Well academics already have the gold, but they somehow have found a way to make everything they touch turn to shit.”

Here’s how I sometimes picture this going.

(Okay, so I’m being a bit facetious and don’t really think this graph is always true, but you get my point.)

I wonder if all the thought and time I put into my thesis topic would have been better served if I had done something else with the material. Something other than an academic dissertation. Because, really, who even read the thing? My supervisor, bless her soul, read my full thesis--and more than once! My two evaluators read it. My graduate director read it and, in a surprising turn of events, the secretary of my faculty read it. It’s on academia.edu and other similar academic sites, and some colleagues have downloaded it and probably read bits and pieces of it. Although I gave a copy of it to all of my research participants, most of them admitted to only skimming the first few pages before deciding to just read the two-page summary that I wrote especially for them. So, other than my adoring parents, I wonder if it has been read by anyone outside of the academy. I would guess not...which feels like a shame, because I think that (at least some of!) the ideas within it have potential to promote positive change. (Also, the federal government funded my studies, which is a whole other thing to consider..!)

I think academics need to focus on finding and filling a different gap. Not simply a content-based gap, but the more general gap between ivory tower thoughts and the world outside of the ivory tower. Some people advocate for leaving academia's Ivory Tower and this blog has some interesting posts on that if you want to check the out! And this blog tries to demystify the Ivory Tower and reclaim the term in a positive sense. 

And yet, academia has arguably retained some pretty smart minds (you can debate me on this if you want); and a significant part of an academic’s job is literally to think, to learn, and to teach. This is an amazing privilege for each individual, and it could be a great contribution to others—both inside and outside of academia. But a lot of this potential is lost if only other academics are affected by (or included in) academic pursuits.

Let me break this down.

Out of the 7.125 billion people in the world, roughly 6.16 million are academics. That’s roughly 0.8% of the world.

Now, out of that 0.8%, how many do you suppose are in ANY of your overlapping fields? *Gulp*. Now, out of that ridiculously small number, how many do you suppose have gotten around to reading your particular work? *Double gulp.*

I estimate that roughly 8 (eight) people read my master’s thesis from cover to cover. (Did I mention there are 7.125 billion people in the world? ....8.) 

I don't know about you, but I don't feel so great. 

Don’t get me wrong. This is NOT a post to make you feel like your work is meaningless and worthless and has no point. Far from it. I really, really do believe that academic inquiry is important and valuable. I couldn’t keep at it otherwise.

But I’m not convinced that our work is having the impact that it could have if the academy broadened its definition of what counts as a “contribution” and what constitutes as “filling a gap.” We need to not just focus on filling and finding a gap in terms of content that has been covered, but we need to find creative and innovative ways to fill the gap that exists between academia and the world outside of the ivory tower. This effort to connect with the world outside of academia should be celebrated as a positive contribution. 

Some academics like Craig Calhoun at LSE are calling academia out on its focus on specialised publications:

It is a great error for universities to prize publications over scholarship, teaching, and really original research. https://t.co/rsdapTs9hX

— Craig Calhoun (@craigjcalhoun) January 1, 2016

Others are trying to re-imagine the dissertation itself:

Sandra den Otter makes the case for reimagining the diss to include publicly engaged scholarship. #FutureHumanities pic.twitter.com/0EjfYatPqX

— Josh Lambier (@JoshuaLambier) May 18, 2016

Other conference-like events are bringing together academics and artists and trying to increase public engagement. 

Excited to hear Dr. Tim Eatman from @ImaginingAmer speak on "Publicly Engaged Scholarship: The Power of Imagining" #foodinsecurity

— K-StateRes&Extension (@KStateResExt) April 4, 2016

In the interest of keeping this post from becoming dissertation-length, I'll cut myself off here. What are your thoughts about this model of academic contributions? Does it gain anything? Lose anything? How do you think publicly-engaged scholarship can be practically achieved? Feel free to comment below or to PM me.